Thanks for the credit, Liz, but it was BobL that had the inside scoop that explained the mysterious quiet on illegal immigration.
I just added some comments that I didn’t think Trump would’ve complied anyway, since he’s not owned by the RNC or any donors.
Sad that the others are. Politics has become a game where we don’t know who is calling the shots nor what they’ll decide after we already voted (like the 2014 back-stabbing elections).
sorry, forgot to ping you!
Thanks Cottonball. It was in August and there was a guest host for Michael Medved (so you could imagine where this is going).
He was interviewing SOMEONE, but I never got his name (I was driving home from work) - but he was kind of GOPe. He said exactly as you paraphrased - at the start of the Primary season all the probable candidates were simply told that if the wanted to see a dime of big money, they would abide by certain rules, with keeping quiet on immigration being the TOP RULE...as they were (conveniently) convinced by Frank Luntz’s (directed-result) polling that Romney’s throw-away debate line in Jan. 2012 regarding him pressing for policies to make Illegals self-deport cost him the election. Nothing else. They guy was genuinely angry that Trump had blown open the entire plan, for the entire part - as if all of the candidates would somehow be able to avoid the media calling them anti-Hispanic for some newly-invented ‘micro-aggression’...was never going to happen anyway.
So between the threat of no big money and, most likely, the inability of the Republican candidates to do their own polling at that time, they all acceded to the demands, and just as in 2008 and 2012, immigration was ‘just another issue’, at best.
Yet the Republican base is and has been SEETHING about the issue for almost a decade...so Trump was no genius, Cruz could have done the same, and Sanatorum, for that matter. But they did not. It doesn’t mean they supported Amnesty, it just meant that they felt constrained by party dictates.
Thanks BobL. Great tidbit.